PARIS: The death of Pope John Paul II set the stage for mass mourning, a phenomenon of the modern age in which profound grief for a charismatic leader is amplified and channelled by the media, a sociologist said on Tuesday.
“The death of the pope has got all the ingredients for mega-scale mourning,” said Tony Walter, a reader in sociology at Britain’s University of Reading and author of several books on the culture of grief.
An expected turnout of two million mourners in St. Peter’s Square, attendance at Friday’s funeral by hundreds of leaders and the flowering of “virtual candles” and cybershrines on the Internet all point to a snowball of public grief.
Walter noted two previous events in recent years that spurred mass displays of sorrow — the death of Diana, the Princess of Wales, in 1997 that saw an extraordinary outpouring among Britons, and the aftermath of 9/11, in which Americans expressed grief and defiance after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Mass displays of grief are part of human history, as the accounts of the funerals of pharaohs, kings and great leaders testify, said Walter in a phone interview with AFP.
“Mourning and funeral ritual have an important function. After a loss, there’s a natural inclination for people to be with other people, a gut feeling of clinging together and saying ‘our father is dead but our family will survive’, ‘the king is dead, long live the king, the monarchy will go on’, ‘our country has been attacked but will survive’.”
Several factors can make a difference in scale, determining whether the mourning is experienced by individuals or millions, he said.
The bigger the institution and the more popular the leader, the bigger and more elaborate the funeral rites, which helps to instil a sense of history to which many people want to belong, he said.
Then there is TV “which amplies this to some extent,” said Walter.
“There is a tendency of the visual news media to pick out the mourners who are in floods of tears and hugging each other and being in tears, which is more photogenetic than people who are standing stoically in line,” Walter said.
“But I am not saying that this is something entirely got up by the media. It has to respond to something within people.”—AFP
